Nancy Huston - Infrared

‘It almost looks like a woman giving birth, doesn’t it, Dad?’ says Ingrid.

‘Yeah, except that they’re men’s legs,’ Simon points out.

‘Don’t you want to take a photo, Rena?’

‘I don’t photograph weird things.’

Oh, I see, says Subra, again imitating Ingrid’s voice, you don’t photograph weird things. Three hundred and fifty Whore Sons and Daughters —there’s nothing weird about that, of course. Mafiosi, hooligans, traders, sleeping nudes — just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill stuff.

Rena moves closer to the window and peers beyond the pair of legs inside the workshop, then recoils with a gasp.

‘What’s wrong?’

There, inches away from her face, lying on his back — a living man. Smouldering dark eyes, slightly yellowed teeth, flaring nostrils, low forehead, reddish beard, hairy arms — a Cro-Magnon male, alive.

No. But for an instant, yes. She receives his presence, the heat of his body. No. But for an instant, yes.

Simon points out a dusty sign tacked to the workshop door, and she translates: ‘Taxidermy, Moulding.’

‘Must be some sort of wax figure they’re making for an installation at the Museum of Natural History,’ Simon speculates. ‘When they finish with the legs, they’ll rotate him through a hundred and eighty degrees and set him on his feet.’

‘But he won’t be erect,’ Ingrid objects.

‘Yeah, well, he’ll be sort of hunched over — to light a fire, say.’

That mystery more or less satisfactorily solved, they hobble back across the courtyard. The wild man continues to smoulder within her, though. What is it? Like what? A disturbing twinge of some far-off thing…

Simon comes to a halt. ‘I wonder what the cavewoman felt,’ he says, ‘when the caveman grabbed her by the hair and dragged her down the path to shtup her in the cave.’

Rena laughs to be polite, even as she heaves an inward sigh.

‘I mean,’ her father goes on, ‘it can’t have been much fun to go bouncing and scraping along on the pebbles and rocks like that. To say nothing of all the thistles and nettles and spiky plants that would have been growing amongst them. After her deflowering, the woman would probably cut her hair real short, to let the other men know — okay you guys, from now on: shtupping yes, dragging no. No more of that dragging crap.’

‘What I wonder,’ says Rena, joining the game out of habit, ‘is why he had to drag her to a cave in the first place. Why wouldn’t he just shtup her out in the open? I mean, were the Cro-Magnon as modest as all that? Was shtupping already a private activity back then?’

Ostentatiously, Ingrid holds her tongue. She detests conversations like this between Simon and Rena. Finds it abnormal for a father and daughter to indulge in this sort of banter, as if they were buddies. With her own father…God forbid! Had a single syllable on the theme of sex ever passed her lips in his presence, he would have turned her to stone with a glance. To stone!

Try as she might, Rena can’t stop. ‘Besides,’ she insists, ‘why would he have had to grab her by the hair? I don’t get it. Didn’t she feel like shtupping? The virginity taboo didn’t come along until much later, right? In the Neolithic?’

No man ever had to drag you by the hair, that’s for sure, says Subra in Ingrid’s voice. That Rena is boy-crazy!

True, concedes Rena. All a man needs to do is put his hand on the small of my back and my will dissolves completely, my blood tingles like quicksilver, my skin grows a million small soft glittering scales, my legs become a fishtail and I metamorphose into a mermaid. There’s something so hypnotic about a man’s desire…its imperiousness…A violent thrill of fright and euphoria goes through you when you sense he’s chosen you… at this instant…Surely the cavewoman would have felt the same melting, the same tingling…

They start walking again. Some fifty yards along, Simon comes to a halt. ‘Maybe the cavewoman didn’t mind being dragged by the caveman,’ he says. ‘Maybe her brain released a bunch of endorphins so she wouldn’t feel the pain. A bit like when a fakir walks barefoot on hot coals.’

‘That’s conceivable,’ Rena says.

‘But maybe the fakir’s pain makes itself felt later on,’ suggests Ingrid, in a rare attempt at humour. ‘I mean, maybe he nurses his burns in secret after the performance, when no one is looking. Right, Dad?’

‘No, no,’ says Simon. ‘There are plenty of scientific studies on fakirs — the soles of their feet are perfectly smooth and pink at the end of the ordeal. No doubt about that.’

They start walking again.

When did my father lose the ability to talk and walk at the same time? wonders Rena.

She makes every effort not to rush them, telling herself there’s no reason to advance at one speed rather than another. (‘Why is my little Rena always in such a hurry?’ Alioune often asked her, when they were still married…‘What Makes Rena Greenblatt Run?’—the title of an article about her in some Parisian magazine, ages ago.) But here, today, her impatience is intransitive. Existential. A solid, flourishing psychic reality, eager to apply itself to any activity that might come along in the course of the day.

Some twenty yards further on, Simon comes to a halt. ‘On the other hand,’ he muses, ‘it’s altogether possible that the cavewoman’s mother trotted out her herbal pastes and tended to her daughter’s back once the caveman had pulled up his pants and trundled off to shoot a mammoth.’

‘Cro-Magnon didn’t wear pants,’ says Ingrid.

‘Right,’ sighs Rena. ‘Shall we have a look at this church?’

Proroga

Before they can even get close to San Lorenzo, though, the couple asks for a break. They want to rest on a bench for a few minutes.

Simon shuts his eyes and Rena studies him: heavy eyelids, age-speckled hands and cheeks, furrowed brow, wispy grey hair…Her Daddy. And such a big belly now. How heavy he’s become…Whatever happened to the man she’d worshipped during childhood and adolescence, the Westmount years — that slender, handsome young Jewish scientist with his shock of dark curly hair? You, too, Father, once dreamed of Rinascimento. So many botched rebirths, tufts of hair torn out by the roots, tears shed, screams screamed or repressed, years wasted under the sombre reign of doubt…Hey Daddy, it’s a gorgeous day, relax! Sit down, sit back, let this ray of Florentine sunshine warm your face…

When Rena was little, her father would sometimes allow her to creep into his study and watch him read and write. (As for her mother’s study, either it was empty because she was off pleading in court or else she was receiving a client there for some top-secret conversation and no one else was allowed in. Ms Lisa Heyward had foreign origins and a man’s job — two things Rena was proud of. Whereas other kids’ mothers were boringly Canadian and worked as homemakers, schoolteachers or secretaries, hers hailed from Australia and was a lawyer. Not only that, but Ms Lisa Heyward hadn’t changed her name when she married, which was almost unheard-of at the time. As mothers went, she was exceptionally independent, not to say unreachable.)

On good days, Simon would let his daughter come and curl up on the couch across from his desk. How she loved those moments! Her daddy looked so handsome, lost in thought…his glasses pushed back on his high forehead, his sensitive hands holding pen and paper… ‘Mommy’s a lawyer and what are you, Daddy?’ ‘A researcher.’ ‘How come? Do you keep losing things?’ ‘Ha, ha, ha, ha!’

But there were bad days, too, when Simon would stay locked up in his study from dawn to dusk. Silence and absence in the daytime — and at night, spectacular quarrels with Lisa in the course of which Rena would learn new words in spite of herself — pretentious, irresponsible, pseudo-genius, mortgage, immature, castrating princess… Simon would roar and Lisa would shriek. Simon would kick walls and Lisa would slam doors. Simon would overturn tables and Lisa would hurl plates. Rena guessed at this division of labour rather than actually witnessing it, for at such times she had a marked tendency to burrow beneath her blankets, drag a pillow over her head and stick her fingers into her ears…